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Over the past decade, developmental and social psychological research has explicitly adopted a developmental intergroup framework, integrating social and developmental psychology fields to understand the origins of social exclusion and prejudice. This article argues that a social developmental analysis of how groups and individuals experience, evaluate, and understand exclusion is essential for a complete picture of the human experience, interpretation, and consequences of exclusion. What has been missing in much of the social psychological research on exclusion is an incorporation of developmental perspectives; likewise, what has been missing in development psychological research is a focus on group identity and group dynamics for understanding the basis for exclusionary behavior in childhood. Yet, the roots of adult forms of exclusion can be documented in childhood, and children who experience exclusion are particularly at risk for negative outcomes, and especially when exclusion is based on group membership. Moreover, interventions designed to ameliorate social problems associated with exclusion need to be based on an understanding of how, why, and under what conditions, children and groups make decisions to exclude others, how they experience this exclusion, and how exclusion originates and changes over the course of the lifespan. Thus, a growing body of psychological work, exemplified in this issue of the Journal of Social Issues (2014), highlights implications for theory in psychology and related social sciences, and for interventions and policies to tackle social exclusion.

This paper analyzes how the verb<i> hope</i> acquires meaning in early childhood. It begins by critiquing the assumption that mental verbs derive meaning from corresponding referents. Meaning is instead constructed as children learn the conventions and practices that guide use of the word within discourse. Describing these conventions and practices illustrates that <i>hope</i> expresses desires and preferences about future, uncertain, and possible events. The ways in which early cognitive development may contribute to children's understanding of hope are discussed. A case study of one child's early use of <i>hope</i> augments the theoretical analyses presented in the paper.

Many biological systems have critical periods that overlap with the age of maternal provisioning via placenta or lactation. As such, they serve as conduits for phenotypic information transfer between generations and link maternal experience with offspring biology and disease outcomes. This review critically evaluates proposals for an adaptive function of these responses in humans. Although most models assume an adult function for the metabolic responses to nutritional stress, these specific traits have more likely been tailored for effects during fetal life and infancy. Other biological functions are under stronger evolutionary selection later in life and thus are better candidates for predictive plasticity. Given the long human life cycle and environmental changes that are unpredictable on decadal timescales, plastic responses that evolved to confer benefits in adolescence or adulthood likely rely on cues that integrate matrilineal experiences prior to gestation. We conclude with strategies for testing the timescale and adaptive significance of developmental responses to early environments.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a global societal, economic, and social upheaval unseen in living memory. There have been substantial cross-national differences in the kinds of policies implemented by political decision-makers to prevent the spread of the virus, to test the population, and to manage infected patients. Among other factors, these policies vary with politicians' sex: early findings indicate that, on average, female leaders seem more focused on minimizing direct human suffering caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, while male leaders implement riskier short-term decisions, possibly aiming to minimize economic disruptions. These sex differences are consistent with broader findings in psychology, reflecting women's stronger empathy, higher pathogen disgust, health concern, care-taking orientation, and dislike for the suffering of other people—as well as men's higher risk-taking, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, narcissism, and focus on financial indicators of success and status. This review article contextualizes sex differences in pandemic leadership in an evolutionary framework. Evolution by natural selection is the only known process in nature that organizes organisms into higher degrees of functional order, or counteracts the unavoidable disorder that would otherwise ensue, and is therefore essential for explaining the origins of human sex differences. Differential sexual selection and parental investment between males and females, together with the sexual differentiation of the mammalian brain, drive sex differences in cognition and behavioral dispositions, underlying men's and women's leadership styles and decision-making during a global pandemic. According to the sexually dimorphic leadership specialization hypothesis, general psychobehavioral sex differences have been exapted during human evolution to create sexually dimorphic leadership styles. They may be facultatively co-opted by societies and/or followers when facing different kinds of ecological and/or sociopolitical threats, such as disease ...

AbstractA previous publication reported the etiology of mathematics performance in 7-year-old twins (Oliver et al., 2004). As part of the same longitudinal study we investigated low mathematics performance and normal variation in a representative United Kingdom sample of 1713 same-sex 9-year-old twins based on teacher-assessed National Curriculum standards. Univariate individual differences and DeFries-Fulker extremes analyses were performed. Similar to our results at 7 years, all mathematics scores at 9 years showed high heritability (.62–.75) and low shared environmental estimates (.00–.11) for both the low performance group and the full sample. Longitudinal analyses were performed from 7 to 9 years. These longitudinal analyses indicated strong genetic continuity from 7 to 9 years for both low performance and mathematics in the normal range. We conclude that, despite the considerable differences in mathematics curricula from 7 to 9 years, the same genetic effects largely operate at the two ages.

Developmental origins of health and disease (DOHaD) and epigenetics have expanded understanding of how the environment affects the health of women before and during pregnancy—with lifelong health consequences for the fetus. This has translated to a narrow focus on women's lifestyle during pregnancy, especially for women classified as obese. In this study, we show that psychosocial harms such as distress or shame felt by pregnant women are rarely countenanced in these endeavors. To demonstrate this, we examine published documents about a large set of trials of lifestyle interventions united through an international consortium. Yet there is now a literature in which pregnant women with large bodies report feeling humiliated and a wider literature on the stigma of obesity. We argue that shame is produced and reproduced through the discursive and material knowledge-making scientific practices of DOHaD translation. Interventions that intensify the shame of large body size in pregnancy may be stressful, and neurophysiological stress pathways are well-known within DOHaD to have consequences for fetal development, so these interventions potentially undermine the very processes they set out to protect. A feminist response may protect women from shame and redirect attention to the social and structural determinants of health.

IntroductionThe ORIGINS Project ("ORIGINS") is a longitudinal, population-level birth cohort with data and biosample collections that aim to facilitate research to reduce non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and encourage 'a healthy start to life'. ORIGINS has gathered millions of datapoints and over 400,000 biosamples over 15 timepoints, antenatally through to five years of age, from mothers, non-birthing partners and the child, across four health and wellness domains: 'Growth and development', 'Medical, biological and genetic', 'Biopsychosocial and cognitive', 'Lifestyle, environment and nutrition'.
MethodsMothers, non-birthing partners and their offspring were recruited antenatally (between 18 and 38 weeks' gestation) from the Joondalup and Wanneroo communities of Perth, Western Australia from 2017 to 2024. Data come from several sources, including routine hospital antenatal and birthing data, ORIGINS clinical appointments, and online self-completed surveys comprising several standardised measures. Data are merged using the Medical Record Number (MRN), the ORIGINS Unique Identifier and the ORIGINS Pregnancy Number, as well as additional demographic data (e.g. name and date of birth) when necessary.
ResultsThe data are held on an integrated data platform that extracts, links, ingests, integrates and stores ORIGINS' data on an Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud-based data warehouse. Data are linked, transformed for cleaning and coding, and catalogued, ready to provide to sub-projects (independent researchers that apply to use ORIGINS data) to prepare for their own analyses. ORIGINS maximises data quality by checking and replacing missing and erroneous data across the various data sources.
ConclusionAs a wide array of data across several different domains and timepoints has been collected, the options for future research and utilisation of the data and biosamples are broad. As ORIGINS aims to extend into middle childhood, researchers can examine which antenatal and early childhood factors predict middle childhood outcomes. ORIGINS also aims to link to State and Commonwealth data sets (e.g. Medicare, the National Assessment Program -- Literacy and Numeracy, the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme) which will cater to a wide array of research questions.

The developmental origins of health and disease (DOHaD) hypothesis states that environmental influences in utero and in early life can determine health and disease in later life through the programming of genes and/or altered gene expression. The DOHaD is likely to have had an effect in South Africa during the fifty years of apartheid; and during the twenty years since the dawn of democracy in 1994. This has profound implications for public health and health promotion policies in South Africa, a country experiencing increased prevalence of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) and risk factors and behaviours for NCDs due to rapid social and economic transition, and because of the DOHaD. Public health policy and health promotion interventions, such as those introduced by the South African Government over the past 20 years, were designed to improve the health of pregnant women (and their unborn children). They could in addition, through the DOHaD mechanism, reduce NCDs and their risk factors in their offspring in later life. The quality of public health data over the past 40 years in South Africa precludes the possibility of proving the DOHaD hypothesis in that context. Nevertheless, public health and health promotion policies need to be strengthened, if South Africa and other low and middle income countries (LMICs) are to avoid the very high prevalence of NCDs seen in Europe and North America in the 50 years following the Second World War, as a result of socio economic transition and the DOHaD.

We have previously reported on the findings of a critical realist concurrent triangulated mixed method multilevel study that sought to identify and explain complex perinatal contextual social and psychosocial mechanisms that may influence the developmental origins of health and disease. That study used both emergent and construction phases of a realist explanatory theory building method. The purpose of this article is to present the thesis, theoretical framework, propositions, and models explaining neighborhood context, stress, depression, and the developmental origins of health and disease. The analysis draws on an extensive extant literature; intensive (qualitative), extensive (quantitative), and multilevel studies used for phenomena detection, description, and emergent phase theory development; and the abductive and retroductive analysis undertaken for the theory construction phase. Global, economic, social, and cultural mechanisms were identified that explain maternal stress and depression within family and neighborhood contexts. There is a complex intertwining of historical, spatial, cultural, material, and relational elements that contribute to the experiences of loss and nurturing. Emerging is the centrality of social isolation and " expectation lost" as possible triggers of stress and depression not only for mothers but possibly also for others who have their dreams shattered during life's transitions. The thesis: In the neighborhood spatial context, in keeping with critical realist ontology, global-economic, social, and cultural-level generative powers trigger and condition maternal, psychological, and biological-level stress mechanisms, resulting in the phenomenon of maternal depression and alteration of the infants' developmental trajectory.

AbstractThe authors develop a conceptual, testable model suggesting lack of developmental synchrony between cortical and subcortical neural tracts necessary for breathing control underlying human vocalization (speech breathing), potentially leaving infants vulnerable to inconsolable crying. They propose that this lack of developmental synchrony also helps explain the human susceptibility to sudden infant death syndrome. Beginning around 1 month, during sleep and awake periods, infants gradually learn to shift between volitional and autonomic breathing control based on developing functional interconnections between cortical and subcortical neural networks. The existence of sudden infant death syndrome and inconsolable crying may reflect adaptive failures exacerbated by prolonged parent–infant separation, whether night or day, due to one or the other subsystem of neural networks and/or their functioning nuclei not being equally mature or able to sufficiently send, detect, or respond to signals provided by the other. Implications of these proposed models for family practice and family science research are examined.